Maria’s Guides

It’s a bit involved, but doable.

Yesterday, I explained how you can “unlearn” a word that you mistakenly added to Mac OS X’s user dictionary. Of course, applications other than those developed by Apple probably don’t use Apple’s dictionary.

Microsoft Word is a good example. It stores the words you add to it in a Custom dictionary file. To remove a word you added by mistake, you have to manually edit this dictionary. Here’s how you can do this in Word 2004 for Mac OS; the technique is similar in Word 2003 for Windows.

1. In Word, choose Microsoft Word > Preferences. (Note that a document window must be open to choose this command.)
2. In the Preferences dialog that appears, choose Spelling and Grammar.
   
3. Click the Dictionaries button.
4. In the Custom Dictionaries dialog that appears, select the name of the dictionary you want to edit.
   
5. Click the Edit button.
6. A dialog like the one shown next appears. Click OK.
   
7. A Word window named Custom Dictionary opens. It contains all the words in your dictionary, in alphabetical order. Make changes as desired in this file, adding or removing words as you see fit.
   
8. Choose File > Save to save the modified file.
9. If a dialog like the one shown next appears, click Yes.
   
10. Click the Custom Dictionary’s close button to dismiss it.
11. If you had Check spelling as you type turned on before you started this process, go back into the Spelling and Grammar preferences and turn it back on.

From that point forward, Word will recognize only the words in its main dictionary and the custom dictionary as you edited it.

Page References

Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide offers additional information related to this topic:

• Enabling Automatic Spelling Checking, page 143
• Checking Spelling as You Type, page 144
• Setting Spelling and Grammar Preferences, pages 380-382